3 Challenges in Online Public Procurement part 1: Renewed fragmentation

2019-01-01

In this series of articles we provide an insight in the biggest online tendering issues.

Although we can see an incremental increase in international governments and governmental bodies that publish their tenders online, there is still a lot to win here for 2 reasons:

these governments provide their information with their own specific systematics, file structure and user interface.

public procurement data becomes increasingly more scattered throughout the internet.

This makes it very difficult for companies that are searching for the right public tenders creating 3 challenges to conquer:

Renewed Fragmentation

Lack of Transparency

Absence of governmental accountability

Today we discuss the first topic of our series:

Renewed fragmentation

Sorry, renewed fragmentation? What do you me mean? Well, let me explain. Every national governmental institution wants to create their own national online platform for proliferation of their tender requests for buying products and services from external suppliers. So with almost 200 countries in de the world, this number ads up quickly. But we’re not there yet. Local and regional authorities of most countries are only obligated to publish their tenders above a certain threshold. All tender request below the threshold are published on regional or local sites. And what to think of the fire brigade or public health services? They also public on their own platforms. Now you understand our renewed fragmentation?

But is there no one trying to shed some light in the dark here? There sure is! The EU tries to make the online public procurement world more connected by creating CPV and NUTS-codes (see our blogs about CPV and NUTS), and by publishing the Tenders Electronic Daily, or TED. This is the official tender website of the EU, where you will typically find an overview of tenders from across different European countries and governments. However governments are only obligated to publish tenders above a predefined threshold, e.g. construction of a building worth more than € 5,25M, or services such as legal support worth higher than €200k for a municipality. The majority of the tenders published globally are below this threshold. So the EU is making an effort here, but we’re not quite there jet. The fragmentation of tender publication makes searching for tender opportunities a time-consuming business. Not to speak of the language difficulties arising from the fragmentation. It is shear impossible if you’re not speaking multiple languages, because the tenders on national and local platforms are mostly published in the local language. This creates (unintended) new entry barriers for foreign companies that like to bid for local contracts. - Something we thought to encourage by publishing tenders online in the first place? The result of the fragmentation is less competition instead of more.

Tender-it.com: your one stop shop for tenders

The renewed fragmentation is one of the challenges where our idea and drive to start Tender-it.com stems from. We are developing our technology to use the strength of the internet to bundle all online tendering platforms worldwide and reduce the fragemention. It’s the place to go to find tenders from multiple sources without being a fulltime job. Our team is continuously adding new tender sources and platforms, which we make searchable online in an intelligent way and manageable via our tender management dashboard. Please do check it out under: www.tender-it.com and let us know what you think of it.